Relaxed fit

 

   A friend has told me told me several times that he grew up on a farm and now has a pair of overalls – “bibs” he calls them – that he wears around the house.  He says this is because “they aren’t so fashionable.”

   What does this mean?  Is he saying I’m out of fashion wearing overalls?  Why does he only wear them at home and not want others to see him in bibs, like they are something bad, like he’s ashamed of them? 

   Before my spinal surgery, overalls were all I wore for many years, sometimes literally without a shirt. (As someone who always worked at home or in the theater, I had the luxury of being able to do so.) Since my surgery, with overalls being much harder to put on and take off, I try to wear them often (more on this later). I like to think I’m fashion-forward or above fashion.   

   I see bibs, as I also like to say, on plenty of women, but, from what I see, guys in overalls are pretty rare.  This isn’t to say I never see guys wearing bibs, but it’s usually in certain settings like construction sites, farms, rock and folk music concerts and perhaps parties.  I have had friends borrow some of my more unique striped and tye-dyed bibs to wear at parties and concerts – one guy reported that people raved over him in the bibs – but they didn’t feel comfortable or right wearing them in other settings or on an everyday (non-workday) basis.  The same guy was even uncomfortable wearing the plain blue overalls that a friend gave him (although he looked quite good in them). 

   I do sometimes see guys walking around, just going about their day,  in bibs, but they are almost like rare bird sightings.

   What is it about guys in bibs that isn’t “so fashionable?” Is it a class thing, a status thing – the idea that overalls are for laborers and farmers?  Is it about overalls being for toddlers (and women?), not for big boys and grown men?  Is it that, as I have heard, overalls are “gay?”

   I don’t know, and, frankly, I don’t care.  I enjoy being in bibs and being seen in them*.

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   After my spinal surgery, wearing overalls became considerably more difficult, because I can no longer assist in putting them on and taking them off. In the two or three years after my surgery, I donated or sold literally bags full of overalls – yes, I had that many! – which were too tight on me, too frail, etc. As silly as it sounds, this was quite difficult.   

   But I still wanted to wear them and did so, thanks to my and my attendants’ patience and persistence.  Even so, I have, for the first time in my life, put on weight in recent years (being paralyzed instead of in nearly constant motion since the surgery), and it has become too difficult to wear even some of the bibs I have remaining. 

   I still want to be in bibs, though.  So, I have been replacing some of my favorite pairs with used, relatively cheap pairs that are bigger, much bigger.  Call them relaxed, way relaxed, fit!  Some are ridiculously large, but, hey, it doesn’t matter, because I’m sitting down, and, anyway, I like the baggy bibs look on guys. Plus, they’re super comfy, and it doesn’t matter at my state in life. 

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   Over the years, I have been told that, when it comes to wearing bibs – especially ones that are more unique or colorful - or mismatched Converse high-tops with rainbow laces or sporting braids, dreads, a mohawk or a shaved head, I “pull it off.” I thought of this recently when I watched Booksmart, a hilarious and smart, albeit raunchy, movie about academically competitive high schoolers. 

   In a party scene late in the film, a guy is shirtless in white painter’s overalls which he wears backwards, Marky Mark style.  As stupid, dorky and crazy as it sounds, the guy pulls it off!  I am not saying that guys should do this, and I don’t know what, if any, fitting magic was done (I would love to know how this costume design came about and was enacted), but, for this guy at least, the backwards bibs, while funny, aren’t as silly as they sound and do nicely showcase his chest. (To those who say why not have him be bare-chested, I refer to a friend who once told me that a bit of clothing, carefully placed, can be considerably sexier than no clothes.  Also, why don’t painters wear white, or any, overalls anymore?)

 

*I like being seen in overalls in addition to or, ideally, instead of as a guy in a wheelchair, as I explored in a series of YouTube videos I created some years ago, before the spinal surgery, entitled, “The Guy in the Overalls (and the Wheelchair).”            

What was lost

 

   I recently realized that I’m feeling overwhelmed by the last six months or so, with my dad dying, the election, the holidays, the L.A-area fires and now Trump 2.0. (No, I’m not watching the inauguration – and what an obscenity to have it on the MLK holiday!)

   The fires have really taken a lot out of me, although they are “over there,” as I discuss in a column published on Friday in the Claremont Courier and below.  Not only do I have friends and cousins and one attendant who have been evaluated, the fires have stirred up a lot in me, like embers and ashes.  Many places that I love are gone, but, what’s more, they’ve been gone quite a while, since my spinal surgery seven years ago, when the drive and the traffic became just too hard.  In short, now that L.A, as many are saying, will never be the same, even with rebuilding, the fires are like the surgery, in how it radically changed my life. 

   I’ve been thinking about all the things I’ve been missing: going to dinner in Santa Monica after spending hours on the beach on PCH, passing the lines outside clubs after getting out of plays in Hollywood on Saturday night, taking the train and subway and bus on my own to see the latest exhibit at the county museum (when it cost $6, not $20, to get in), to meet a friend in Beverly Hills, even to go to the pier in Santa Monica and maybe cruise down to boardwalk to Venice.    

   There were the restaurants, the favorites and the discoveries that became favorites, especially the vegan ones.  I loved Doomies, when it was good, really good – the bomb – with incredible vegan chicken fried steak, pot roast scallops, shrimp served up to tattooed, pierced punks in black high-tops and jeans jackets.  (I felt right at home shirtless in my cut-off bibs and Docs.) The last time I was there, about five years ago, it was just a vegan burger joint.  Talk about missing something!     

           SAYING GOODBYE TO THE L.A, THE LIFE, I KNEW

   I was going to write a nice little column about how Claremont has changed over the years, about how things were there and suddenly not there, about how Claremont is suddenly the way it is and we barely remember the way it was, even a few months ago.  This occurred to me recently as I would go north on College Avenue from Arrow Highway and see the traffic lights at Green Street and think it has always been there, even as they were installed late in the Fall.  There was another traffic light and that weird permanent cone in the middle of the street a block south, replaced by the new lights, right?  Right? 

   I was going to write about other examples of this. Not far from the new traffic lights was a lovely field of wild flowers and grasses before it was used as a movie set across the street from where the Courier office was, just south of the railroad tracks, where I used to go in my wheelchair to hand deliver a hard copy (before it was called a “hard copy”) of my column.  There was the old Courier office on Harvard Avenue where I began working as a summer intern and the train-car restaurant instead of the large office building that now seems to have always loomed over the Village along First Street.  There was the vet office where the Village West plaza now is, and there wasn’t always a traffic light just north of Memorial Park on Indian Hill Boulevard, right?  Right? 

   There are hundreds, thousands of these small, not so small changes that have happened. I even had a nice, clever title: “In the blink of an eye, another Claremont.”

   Then there were the fires. And, suddenly, in the blink of an eye, my column wasn’t so nice, wasn’t so little.

   Sure, the catastrophic wildfires, at least as I write this, are “over there.” They aren’t a Claremont story, as my old editor Martin Weinburger would say. 

   But, for many of us, they are our story.  The fires, which so far have wiped out tens of thousands of acres and thousands of structures and caused at least 13 deaths and may well go on to do who knows how much more destruction, are my story. 

   I have friends and cousins who have been evaluated from Pacific Pallisades and Topanga Canyon.  One of my caregivers has been evaluated from Pasadena. 

   What’s more, much more, though, is that I’m familiar, so familiar, with many of the places now gone or now in danger.  That’s really what makes these fires, which some say will end up being the worst natural disaster in U.S history, so real and, as more than one person has been quoted in the L.A Times, so “surreal.”

     When I graduated from college, I told myself I would live in Claremont, because I could easily get to L.A and other area communities – and that’s exactly what I did.  A lot.  I loved living in Claremont, but I also loved spending days on the beaches on P.C.H and hanging out in Santa Monica and on Melrose Avenue.  I attended plays outdoors in Topanga Canyon as well as dozens of tiny theaters in Hollywood and everywhere else.  I enjoyed drives along Sunset Boulevard, past Will Roger’s house, UCLA where I attended briefly and through Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, and I enjoyed getting as far as I could in my wheelchair in Eaton Canyon and going to movies and free outdoor concerts with well-known artists in Pasadena. 

   Now, some of those places, like Will Roger’s house and the Eaton Canyon park, are gone, unrecognizable like the P.C.H beaches or endangered. Even with rebuilding, already talked about with hope and desperation, Los Angeles, my Los Angeles, will never be the same.

   Actually, the L.A that I know and love hasn’t been the same for some time. In a painfully real way, L.A, for me, has already been  gone. 

   Since my spinal surgery now seven years ago that left me more disabled, going into L.A, especially with all the traffic, has gotten too difficult.  If I go, it’s only once or twice a year, usually to see friends.  (I have enjoyed some time in Eaton Canyon, but, sadly, it looks like that’s gone.)

   While we are safe here in Claremont from the fires “over there,” I know already what it’s like to lose L.A, the L.A that I knew, the L.A we all knew.

Happy New Year - so there!

 

   I don’t get it. 

   I’ve been trying to figure this out: I’m not really crazy about the holidays – as I’ve mentioned, the music and the lights are pretty much the only things I like about them – but I’m sad when they’re over.  You’d think I would be glad, relieved when they’re over.  It doesn’t make sense. 

   Maybe part of it – although not the reason – is that I don’t like New Year’s.  As my friend John says, I don’t do New Year’s. 

    There are a few reasons for this.  One is that I’m not a big partier and not a drinker.  When I was a child, New Year’s Eve was for adults, and I was stuck at home with a sitter or my older sister.  When I did go to New Year’s Eve parties, it felt like everyone was burnt out from holiday parties, and they were just putting in the time.  In any case, I’m not interested in partying and getting drunk with a lot of people. 

   More than that, I don’t like thinking about a whole new year, facing and dealing with if not planning the next 12 months.  It’s like diving into an icy cold pool.  I don’t really advocate just sticking your toes in, but I’m more about one day at a time. Perhaps the bottom line is that I don’t like thinking or am afraid of thinking about what I may have or won’t have when the next holiday season comes around (which feels like a long time but will no doubt come soon enough). I don’t like being made so aware that time has gone by, that time is going by. 

   Perhaps in an effort to counter all this, I have made it a point to say, in at least my e-mails, “Happy New Year!” for a good part of January.  It is my way of feeling just a bit better, of sloughing off these non-sensical post-holidays blues. 

   And with Trump being inaugurated this month, I will need “Happy New Year!” all the more.  It will be something of a stand, an act of defiance, if not a war cry.    
   A friend says she’ll be saying “Hopeful New Year” instead of “Happy New Year.” Perhaps that’s worth a try.  Or what about “Happy, hopeful New Year," for just a touch of defiance? 

Christmas lights

 

   Perhaps in the spirit of my last post about needing as much light as possible this Christmas season, I recently got a cat from the local pound – an orange one-year-old. I had not had a cat for some time, and I had been saying that I wanted to get one (or two) for a while.  When I got him, his name was Cashew, which I thought was stupid.  I named him Aaron, because I like biblical names, because it remind me of a lion and because he is small – I suspect he’s a runt - and I want him to be brave. 

   Also when I got him, his tail had been amputated.  Perhaps he touched my heart as a fellow disabled creature. Also, his backside is shaved and waddles when he walks, like he’s strutting around in chaps – quite funny!  Unfortunately, the cone he had been given was too small, and he was able to lick the stump, and it began bleeding. I took him back to the pound where he had another surgery and was given a bigger cone and more meds at no cost.  He doesn’t like either, but he’s being a pretty good boy.  He was even good when I had his nails trimmed – he was hurting me and my attendants, although that clearly wasn’t his intention. 

  Aaron was hurting me, because, soon after I got him, he was climbing up and sitting on my lap, purring like a motor boat.  I’ve had many cats – yes, I’m a proud cat lady/man – but only a few have sat on my lap and not so soon.  He is indeed brave as well as sweet – truly an Aaron.  What a gift!  Although he does like to push my joystick – a problem – and his meow is really a squeak, making me wonder if I got a mouse instead of a cat!

 

   The best gifts are the ones that are not expected. 

   I’ve been able to go out strolling this late in the year.  It’s cool, but I’m okay in my warmer overalls, turtlenecks and beanies. This has been a special treat, since, as I’ve written about before, Fall is my favorite season, with its colorful, falling leaves and special light, and I was confined to bed jail with a pressure sore on my butt last year. 

   One of my routes includes a small concrete path from the end of a cul-de-sac to an adjacent street.  There were a couple problems with this path.  One was a dangerous split in the concrete – which, much to my pleasant surprise, the city paved over a few years ago when I pointed it out but left it at that.  The other problem was a driveway with a nasty, high lip – a trap for my wheelchair if I wasn’t careful. 

   A couple weeks ago, some unrelated work was done, and the concrete path was replaced and even the driveway lip was paved over.  I assume the wood plank, asphalt and metal plates are temporary, but I’d be quite satisfied with them.  After the Fall we had and with what’s coming next month, I will take any good thing, any gift, any light.

 

   Watch Black Doves on Netflix.  This is a superb, six-part, dark, sexy, London-set spy thriller that’s also a refreshingly not-so-sweet Christmas tale.  Also on Netflix is Hot Frosty, about a buff snowman who comes to life – naked! – which is corny and sappy but also sweet and hot.  (The sleeveless coveralls are sexy; too bad they aren’t overalls!)

 

The leaves turn red, fall

here just in time for Christmas –

an end’s beginning. 

Whenever and however, we need a little Christmas now

 

   The other day, a box arrived on my doorstep.  It was big, but not as big as I thought it would be.

   I’m not sure what I was expecting – probably because I wasn’t sure about what I was getting, if I was sure about getting it.  It felt weird to be getting an artificial Christmas tree, to be getting a Christmas tree in a box.  . 

   All my life, I’ve gone to Christmas tree lots to get a tree when the season came, first as a child with my family and later, proudly, for myself as an adult.  There was always something special about having and celebrating with this vibrant piece of nature in the house (or apartment for a time) with its wonderful fresh smell and decorated with cherished ornaments and lights (or, as I prefer, only lights). There were a couple years when I was in high school when I was allowed to have a small, fresh tree, decorated with lights and ornaments, in my bedroom, like some pet, and there were years when I withstood my environmental friends ribbing me about “killing trees.”

   When I bought my tree last year, I paid a crazy amount that I didn’t feel right paying.  I mentioned this to my sister, who lives in Northern California, and she said she has an artificial tree, which shocked me.  She was `the last person who I thought would have an artificial Christmas tree.  I told her I don’t want a tree that looks fake, and she said the tree she has looks nice.  Last week, I checked out the company (Balsam Hill), and they were having a big Black Friday sale. Even on sale, the trees weren’t cheap, and I bought one, trusting that my sister wouldn’t be wrong and that you get what you pay for. 

   I have the tree set up, and it does look nice – cheery and homey – with lights on it, although, even at 5 and a half feet, it looks oddly small.  Were the trees I was buying really that big?  I may try to put it up on a platform.  And, yes, it will be much easier to set up than going to the lot, getting a big tree into and out of the van and into the house, etc.  Plus, I’m not killing trees. 

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   I suspect the people in the house on the corner down my street have a real tree.  Or are they enlightened environmentalists?  Either way, they and their house look pretty cool, even for liberal Claremont, with plants growing wildly in the front yard and cars plastered with bumper stickers saying things like “Mean people suck,” “I brake for critters” and “Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles.” They always say hi when they see me go by in my overalls.  It’s like having a bit of Berkeley down my street.

   At least a week before Thanksgiving, the front yard was festooned with funky lights and artsy elves and gnomes. I saw a lot of other houses around town with Christmas lights up very early.  When I was talking to my sister recently, she said the same thing was going on in her small town. We agreed that people – at least the ones we see, like my hippy-dippy neighbors – are devastated by the recent Trump victory and desperate for some holiday cheer. 

   So, yes, bring it on.  We are desperate for some holiday cheer this year.  Even if it’s early and is a tree that comes in a box and is small.